Bose Soundtouch

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The Bose SoundTouch 20 is a great streaming speaker with plenty of performance, but it needs some extra service.

Bose Soundtouch

Bose Soundtouch

Ty Pendlebury graduated in Journalism from RMIT Melbourne and has been working since 2006. He lives in New York where he writes for streaming and home audio.

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CEO David Carnoy has been a key member of the review team since 2000. He covers a wide range of devices and is a well-known reviewer of mobile and portable audio products, including headphones and speakers. He is also an expert in e-reading and e-publishing and the author of Knife Music, The Big Exit and Lucidity. All titles are available as Kindle, iBooks, Nook e-books and audiobooks.

Over the years, Sonos has grown from an early stage to dominate the DIY multiroom wireless audio space. There is a lot of competition now.

Bose SoundTouch 20 offers Wi-Fi connectivity and Airplay compatibility; includes Pandora, with more services on the way; High quality sound from a quality unit.

Key services like Spotify are missing; no playlist on the go; no FLAC, WAV or OGG; no high support; no mute or pause buttons on the unit; Easy to install.

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The Bose SoundTouch 20 is a great streaming speaker with powerful performance and great sound, but it needs more support for music services.

Bose has launched a line of Wi-Fi speakers under its new SoundTouch brand, which the company says are easy to set up and operate, and are aimed squarely at the Sonos audience.

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Like Sonos, Bose makes several different speakers, including the SoundTouch 30 ($699), a large speaker designed for larger living spaces, and the smaller SoundTouch Portable ($399) and SoundTouch 20 ($399), designed for smaller rooms.

Bose Soundtouch

You can link those speakers, rename them according to the rooms they’re in, and like Sonos, you can send music to one room or play music through your speakers, all at once.

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Signaling that it’s all about wireless audio, Bose says all of its new speakers and music systems will be SoundTouch-enabled, so there should be plenty of options for different types of speakers to add to a multi-room setup.

The $399 Bose SoundTouch 20 reviewed here competes with Sonos’ Play:5 speaker, which is the same size and price. The Bose sounds better than the Play:5, with a warm, focused sound that flatters most materials. It also measures up well in the style department — the speaker looks very sharp with a practical, minimalist industrial design.

There are a few features Sonos doesn’t offer, such as Apple AirPlay support, and Bose has built its user experience around the concept of six preset buttons designed to quickly get you to your favorite music.

That’s great, but Bose is still working to simplify setup, improve its mobile apps, and integrate popular music services like Spotify, Rdio, Beats, and more.

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Sonos is still ahead in those areas, but we expect Bose to close the gap and improve the SoundTouch system with a steady stream of software updates throughout 2014 and beyond. At the same time, of course, Sonos isn’t standing still — it’s also working to improve its flagship system, which will no doubt offer new speaker options.

The SoundTouch 20 is a compact speaker measuring 7.4 inches tall, 12.4 inches wide, and 4.1 inches deep. In typical Bose fashion, the speaker’s design is minimal, although it has fewer buttons than Bose’s popular SoundLink Bluetooth speakers (no, this speaker doesn’t have Bluetooth).

The top of the unit houses the aforementioned six preset buttons, along with a volume, auxiliary input and power button. A five-line OLED display in the center of the dashboard shows track data. Note that the six preset programs are very similar to the program found on the now defunct UE Smart Radio. However, unlike Smart Radio (and Squeezebox by extension), Bose doesn’t support wireless playlists.

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Bose Soundtouch

The lack of a mute or play/pause button on the unit is a little disappointing, but you do get a remote control — and most of these types of systems don’t come with one — and the functions are the same as those found on the unit, with playback controls . However, there is still no mute button.

Next Generation Bose Soundtouch Wireless Systems Combine Bluetooth And Wi Fi

The SoundTouch 20 has many features of the Sonos system, but one difference is that it’s designed to work with your existing Wi-Fi network and doesn’t require a special “bridge” like the Sonos. That Sonos Bridge, connected to an Ethernet port on your router, establishes a special wireless “mesh” network dedicated to streaming your audio and helps eliminate the hiccups associated with unreliable Wi-Fi.

The SoundTouch 20 also has a “wired” Ethernet connection for those who prefer it, but Bose promotes the simplicity of its system and the ease of setting it up “using your home Wi-Fi network” and nothing else.

We found the setup to be simple, if a little limited. With wireless networking systems like the Sonos and Samsung Shape, you set up the unit (or bridge) with a wired Ethernet connection (the bridge connects to your router) and the system automatically recognizes the other speakers, which is a simple addition.

For Bose, you connect each unit to your computer via USB and place the speaker where you want it. We had a small problem with the corporate firewall (none of the other wireless systems we set up had this problem), but you shouldn’t have this problem at home.

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One thing that helps is if you can schedule everything through your mobile device instead of your computer. Bose is working on offering tweaks through its iOS and Android apps (a feature Sonos offers), but that feature isn’t currently available.

As mentioned, Bose’s simple program revolves around the use of “presets”; All new speakers and apps (Android and iOS devices, as well as Mac and Windows computers supported at launch) are equipped with buttons labeled with numbers 1 to 6. Each number corresponds to a preset app.

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Using apps, you can drag and drop Pandora or Internet radio stations to a number to set as a preset. You can also associate one of the presets with a music library on your computer or a separate folder.

Bose Soundtouch

To turn up the music, simply press one of the preset buttons on the speaker, on the remote control or in one of the apps. Hence the name SoundTouch.

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Unlike other new speakers like the Samsung Shape and Phorus, the Bose doesn’t have Bluetooth capability, but Apple AirPlay has been added to match. In addition to Pandora and Internet Radio, the company said it plans to add IHeartRadio and Deezer in the second half of 2014.

Although the number of currently supported music services is limited, iPhone users can benefit from using AirPlay for basic apps (in other words, you can play Spotify over AirPlay if you want).

The speaker supports DLNA playback from remote devices and MP3, WMA, AAC and Apple Lossless file formats — FLAC support is on the way. Unlike Samsung and Sonos devices, there is no “play from my device” feature unless you set up a DLNA server on it (via Windows Media Player, for example).

Like Sonos, the system doesn’t tell you what format your music is in, and if it encounters a file type it can’t play, the player can simply stop without an error warning message (Bose engineers told us this happened because we played files from a network server). Two other file formats we want to support are WAV and Ogg Vorbis, which is the format that Spotify encodes.

Soundtouch 30 Clock

While Bose didn’t specifically say Spotify would be included, it said it’s working on adding all the major music services, with Spotify and Ogg support coming. (Bose reps told us they need some custom themes to make the development process more difficult, since they want to include the default theme in the services they add).

Bose has a warm and thick sound that does a great job of covering up the sins of the music (or music). That’s not to say he’s not a great speaker, but he can pick out big chunks and leave them out of the loop.

The voices work very well, and, for example, on “Alviverde” by Jun Miyake, the voice of singer Arto Lindsay is most suitable without the Samsung Shape M7. Although they don’t have stereo (drivers on these desktop speakers

Bose Soundtouch

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